This is a film of the elements.

Between the constant wind, the need for water, the dirt and mud, and the light of small, flickering flames, this film is the sum total of reality. In the midst of all of these is the aether, the fifth element that controls movement and light. In this case, the aether is the camera, which moves fluidly about our sparse subjects and observes, yet also commands their fates in a metatextual way. The aether is Tarr's storytelling.

The wind is the uncontrollable power that sweeps away everything. It is the horse's refusal to work and the inevitability of the end. It is constant, grating, and brutal, and it drives those who attempt to move…

First Day: Food and shelter
Second Day: Touching, acquiring and therefore debasing
Third Day: God watches all over you
Fourth Day: Scarcity
Fifth Day: Darkness and silence
Sixth Day: Mortality

Predominant elements throughout the days: A storm raging outside and moving everything that can be found in the air and on the ground, like trying to reach a destination, shadows, cotidianity occupying three alienated souls (two humans, one animal), a strong wind heard while outside, ghastly and scary wind sounds from the inside, repentance, mysteries unspoken, emotional detachment, water and potatoes.

Bonus feature: Presented in the Second Day: A destructive critique to civilization throughout the centuries against authority and other godly figures attempting to establish their false omnipresence above everybody…

Listen.

The wind blows.

We watch a moving world. We do not move ourselves.
We are Pygmalion in reverse. Our daily routine is the chisel, turning us to stone.
We wait. We ignore. We transform.
Time stops.

The wind blows.
It sucks our breath, it drowns our words.
Actions speak louder. Actions can match the wind.
Nature versus routine. An eternal battle to wear away our stone facade.
Both with the same goal, reward, curse. Stone or dust.
Winner signaled by brief panic, then stone or dust.
Time stops.

The wind blows.

Listen.

***

I'd like to place a reservation on my rating for The Turin Horse for now. Béla Tarr is a director I've long been wanting to experience,…

Absolutely Béla Tarr’s Magnus Opus

Tarr’s take on the apocalypse in reverse order of God who created the world in six days. Everything He made now slowly stops working, where on the seventh day the light stops shining. In the beginning a link with Nietzsche is made, namely the horse that Nietzsche would have seen on the street be beaten, after which he fell around the neck sobbing and never wrote again in his life. It’s actually based on a myth in a dream sequence in Dostoevsky’s (which was an inspiration for Nietzsche himself) brilliant novel ‘’Crime and Punishment’’. 

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering” is a well-know quote by Nietzsche,…

More an experience than a film, Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse is one of the bleakest and most depressing pieces of art I have ever encountered. And at the same time it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

Tarr's film builds on a thought, a musing (taken from the film's synopsis): 1889. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse while traveling in Turin, Italy. He tossed his arms around the horse's neck to protect it then collapsed to the ground. In less than one month, Nietzsche would be diagnosed with a serious mental illness that would make him bed-ridden and speechless for the next eleven years until his death. But whatever did…

This is one of those cases where my rating is for the merits of the film and not my preferences. As beautiful as this film is, I could only recommend it to those who are particularly interested in seeing the daily routines and harshness of 19th Century country living, or to serious fans of Tarkovskiy, who are used to slow long shots where not much happens on the screen.

The Turin Horse.

It is gorgeous. Every shot is one of the most beautiful photographs you will ever see.
It sounds beautiful. The score and the harsh wind are almost indistinguishable, both playing the same melody.
The art direction is perfect. Every single dented pot, every crack in the wall, every…

"what's it all about, papa?"
"i don't know."

"the gale roars relentlessly around the house."

"because everything's in ruins, everything's been degraded, but i could say that they've ruined and degraded everything. because this is not some kind of cataclysm. [...] on the contrary, it's about man's own judgement, his own judgement over his own self."

"the heavens are already theirs, and theirs are all our dreams. theirs is the moment, nature, infinite silence. even immortality is theirs, don't you understand? everything, everything is lost forever."

"the storm continues to rage outside; the wind still sweeps relentlessly across the land from the same direction, but now there is nothing in its path to obstruct it. only a great cloud of…

I listen to a lot of Black Metal, especially the music that came out of Norway in the late 80s and early 90s. This was the music infamously made by church burners who took their aesthetic too far, but their intentions were to create soundscapes that represented both their cynical worldview and their brutally cold surroundings. This is why many of their album covers feature either corpses or cold forests. They were artists of intense dedication to a particular style. When winter rolls around I really love listening to their music because tonally it sounds like a dying world. Bela Tarr is the only filmmaker who can convey the tone in imagery that black metal does in sound that I've…

Bela Tarr drops the mic and exits stage left leaving the audience stunned. There is no letting up from a director with such a determined vision, looking at the drudgery of life's routine also proving to be a fitting curtain call to his career.

He imagines what happened to a beaten horse said to have influenced the depression that led to Nietzsche's death. The dense atmosphere of the film links itself to the weighty existential musings of the philosopher creating a far reaching parable. God Is Dead in this ferociously angry land where the sun never shines and the wind batters through the soul.

It is a beautiful film to look at offering no hiding place for the father and…

قصة فيلم نستطيع أن نختصرها بعشر دقائق فقط... ولكن مما وصلني من هذا الفيلم، هو أن بيلا تار لا يهتم بالقصص.. وفعلًا، بعد بحثي عن الفيلم وجدت أن بيلا تار يحتقر القصص، لأنها تضلل المشاهد، وتوهمه بأن هناك شيء يحصل، في حين أنه لا يوجد أي شيء يحصل أساسًا؛ كل مافي الأمر هو أننا نهرب من حالة لحالة أخرى.

لا شيء يحدث بالفيلم حقيقةً، أو لنقل أشياء قليلة تحدث، إلا أن هذه القلة بما فيها من بطء وتكرار وروتين، حمّلها بيلا تار -بخبث شديد- كل الثقل الإنساني الموجع.. منذ اللحظة التي أضرب فيها الحصان عن الطعام، إلى الخبث الأشد دهاءً (في مشهد إذا قلت عنه اسطوري سأُظلمه، بل هو مشهد يكاد أن يصل للكمال... بل وصل) يضع بيلا تار الحصان…

The Turin Horse is one of those films that just keeps growing on you the more you reflect upon it. It is with no doubt the most slow paced experience I’ve had with Béla Tarr to this point, with barely any dialogue and an excessive number of still, yet so beautiful frames. While it occasionally comes of as a struggle to watch, it does an incredible job in catching the depressive realism the characters are subjected to.

From day to day we witness how the daughter of the family performs the few repetitive chores needed to be done, simply for the sake of staying alive. Nothing more, nothing less. With the family horse slowly dying, unable to work, the possibilities…